such as delighted Rossetti and Madox Brown, and grave
and decorative scenery, that will be forgotten the moment an actor has
said 'It is dawn,' or 'It is raining,' or 'The wind is shaking the trees';
and dresses of so little irrelevant magnificence that the mortal actors
and actresses may change without much labour into the immortal people of
romance. The theatre began in ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness
again without recalling words to their ancient sovereignty.

It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the theatre
of Art; for one must get one's actors, and perhaps one's scenery, from the
theatre of commerce, until new actors and new painters have come to help
one; and until many failures and imperfect successes have made a new
tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal that is beginning to float
before our eyes. If one could call one's painters and one's actors from
where one would, how easy it would be. I know some painters, who have
never painted scenery, who could paint the scenery I want, but they have
their own work to do; and in Ireland I have heard a red-haired orator
repeat some bad political verses with a voice that went through one like
flame, and made them seem the most beautiful verses in the world; but he
has no practical knowledge of the stage, and probably despises it.

May 1899.

II

Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that 'He has set the borders of the
nations according to His angels.' It is these angels, each one the genius
of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders of intellectual
traditions; and as lovers understand in their first glance all that is to
befall them, and as poets and musicians see the whole work in its first
impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening whatever the generations
that are to prolong their traditions shall accomplish in detail. It is
only at the awakening--as in ancient Greece, or in Elizabethan England, or
in contemporary Scandinavia--that great numbers of men understand that a
right understanding of life and of destiny is more important than
amusement. In London, where all the intellectual traditions gather to
die, men hate a play if they are told it is literature, for they will not
endure a spiritual superiority; but in Athens, where so many intellectual
traditions were born, Euripides once changed hostility to enthusiasm by
asking his playgoers whether it was his business to teach them, or their
business to teach h